After becoming China's biggest Internet company with a popular chatting tool, Tencent Holdings Ltd is attempting to copy its success both in and outside China with another hit service, WeChat.

The Shenzhen-based company remains cautious in public about its strategy of developing WeChat, a mobile application that enables users to send text messages, voice messages and photos free of charge. However, it isn't hiding its ambition to use the service to help it take a share of the global Internet market.

It has been spending a sum of money on marketing WeChat in Asian markets, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, to make the service, which is already popular on the Chinese mainland, more widely known.